Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Lisa Renee Jones

  I think of how I had sat, slouched in my chair and refusing to look at him when he did my intake. “I probably deserve to know.”

  He leans over and tips his head so I am looking into his eyes. The winter light shines through his blue irises and makes them look silvery. His cheeks are flushed. “You do deserve to know. I wrote, fiercely intelligent. It was the very first thing that I wrote, right at the top of your chart notes. Basically, the exact opposite of stupid. I knew you were angry, sad, but what I noticed, what was noticeable over absolutely everything else, was how goddamned smart you are. I thought about you the entirety of the week after our intake and before your first visit. I wasn’t sure, actually, that I would be up to giving you anything you needed, that I had the skills or the smarts to match you.”

  I think I make a noise, of absolute protest, or embarrassed distress, but Evan just leans in closer and puts his index finger on my elbow, so I can feel the points he’s making, a little press with every word he says.

  “I knew I was going to fuck it up for a while, is what I’m saying. I knew I would have to follow your lead. You’re not”—he tips his head up and looks at the sky, shaking his head—“you’re not stupid. I’m learning, too. I’m not ahead of you, you’re ahead of me.”

  “The blind leading the blind,” I say, before I think better of it.

  He laughs. “Maybe. But that’s the other thing. Right now, today, you’re not blind, whatever that means. You have a limited field of vision, you have vision differences, but all those brains, God, you showed us today that you’ll never, ever fail to see.”

  And now I can’t look at him. I can’t.

  Because I still won’t cry in front of Evan.

  I grab the potato chips, instead, and then reach in for a big handful, and they are the most delicious potato chips in all the world. We eat all of them.

  Chapter Four

  Second Inch

  I crank the heat as soon as I get home from therapy with Evan. The wind hasn’t died down, and I think the snow has picked up, but it’s hard to tell when it’s so windy. It’s two buses from my place to the huge medical center, and I almost fell asleep in the second one.

  The one-block walk from the stop to home wakes me up, but my muscles feel stuporous and heavy and my eyes are gritty—from the wind and from the crying I didn’t do, probably.

  More good tears than sad ones, though.

  My brain is worked up, however, buzzing, from the session with Evan. From our lunch in the courtyard.

  What he said.

  How he looked at me, like I was going to get this, all of it.

  As we ran through his exercise a few more times before we ate, I couldn’t perfectly capture that first epiphany but it was all still so good, that feeling of turning a theory on its head with observable evidence—like yeah, I “know” my other four senses are effective in gathering information about my environment, maybe even as effective as the one that’s limited, but there’s such a universe in that half turn from “know” to evidence.

  Beautiful evidence, lighting up dark places in my brain, and then those new, lit-up areas start positing theories of their own, suggesting glorious experimentation, reassuring me that maybe, maybe, that what made me me was possible to prove in a number of different ways.

  Like, how we know a virus is in the body because of the unique symptoms it produces in the patient and because of a titer of that virus we can count in the blood and because our own immune system produces brand-new antibodies against the virus that we can find in the blood, too.

  All the same virus, proven different ways.

  Closing my eyes, no vision at all available to me, the sight I depend on and that delights me so much, I felt so unlike myself that I had wanted to cry.

  I mean it when I say that nowhere else, except nearly with Evan, not with my mom or Dr. Allen or coworkers or friends have I cried. Or gotten angry. And Evan hasn’t really seen me cry. He’s seen some stray, frustrated tears. And yeah, he’s seen my anger and noncompliance.

  He’s tried to train me to use night-vision-adaptive equipment that I won’t even pick up off the table, he’s sent home CDs of software I’m supposed to install on my computers at home and at work so that my computers recognize my voice and they’re still in my purse.

  I think I could draw the pattern of fake wood grain from the tabletop in the therapy room from memory, so often have I stared at it and traced it with my finger instead of doing whatever it is he wants me to do.

  Instead of acknowledging Evan, or his help, or his existence, really.

  I can still see, I yelled at him last week, my throat tight, because it had no idea how to really do the whole yelling thing. Stop, just stop. You’re doing more to take away my vision than this disease is.

  And then he had let out a breath, uncontrolled, like I’d hit him in the stomach.

  I’d looked at him, one arm over his chest, one fist at his mouth, like he had to hold in yelling back at me.

  I wanted him to. I wanted him to yell at me.

  I wanted something mean and hard to shove back against and scream at, and since it couldn’t be my mom or Dr. Allen, or my lab colleagues, or my worried friends I wasn’t calling, he was tagged as it.

  I had stared at him across that table last week, breathing hard, willing him to answer me with a lecture or with anger or irritation, anything to give me an excuse.

  I was right there in that moment, too, I wasn’t floating above my body or feeling all weird, it was me, and I was mad, and Evan could just so go suck it.

  He stared back, his wide eyebrows steepled, his forehead all wrinkly, his fist at his mouth.

  When I realized he wouldn’t give me what I needed, I stood up, so fast the plastic school chair I was sitting in banged to the floor behind me. I had tripped over it twice, stomping out, hating how big and unwieldy I felt in my own body, hating Evan.

  Hating this thing no one understood or could predict or control.

  Then, after all that last week, I walked in today, and he had told me to hang up my things and meet him in the foyer.

  He had walked past me to leave the therapy room, looked at me, and I realized he was making a concession.

  Not in that room, not today.

  We wouldn’t have to be together in that room anticipating the worst possible thing I could imagine happening to me.

  Then, he had made me close my eyes and given me evidence to examine and catalog and consider.

  I’m sure my mom could write a poem about it, how he made me close my eyes and gave me back some of the vision I had lost, and all I can say is that what happened is something like that and something much more fun, too.

  If you’re a scientist, moments like today where the experiment is running well and there is so much information coming back from it you’ll never be able to sort through it in your lifetime, well, that’s fun.

  Then he had told me that I was the one, all along, leading the way.

  Which is maybe why, at the end, before I had to run to meet my bus because I had actually almost lost track of time, I hugged him.

  Tight, too, one of my patented Jenny Wright hugs that friends ask for, particularly, when they need some squishy happiness.

  He’d said oof, and I squeezed him and pushed my face against his collarbone, smiling, all high from everything that I’d learned.

  He was minty and tall, his sweater scratchy, and I didn’t expect a hug back because maybe that wasn’t allowed or something, but then I found out what absurdly long arms are nice for, which mainly seems to be their ability to get themselves all the way around decent-sized and grateful women.

  He hugs tight, too.

  The heat has made my little row house almost a little too warm, but I haven’t been completely warm all day so I let it run, sinking into the silly-looking papasan chair my mom insisted on getting me for my place, and as usual, she’s right because it is such a comfortable cradle for my round butt and exactly right for when I want to rest my b
ody but my mind isn’t ready to sleep.

  I snuggle into my silly chair, where I can watch the snow through the living-room window and watch for his avatar to highlight, letting me know he’s there.

  I start my message like I always do.

  What did you see today?

  We exchange a few stories, and then C writes,

  When I was a kid the neighbors had this bulldog, Sergeant. They were an older couple and couldn’t give him the exercise he needed, so they paid me five dollars a week to exercise him.

  C has been feeling nostalgic this evening. He posted a picture of a bee on a flower, the yellow-and-black fur of the bee so sharp I wonder why I’ve never tried to pet a bee before.

  When I ask him about it, he sends a long and rambling message about honeysuckle vines and the best way to pull out the stamens and taste the nectar, something his grandma had taught him.

  His other picture has taken me a long time to guess what it is, it’s so close-up, everything in the frame is black and shiny and convoluted like grainy leather, and he finally gives in and tells me it’s a dog’s nose.

  So now I am reading his messages about Sergeant and how he was an epic dog and how it all turned out like that Henry Huggins story by Beverly Cleary where the dog has to choose who his real owner is.

  That book has always made me cry.

  I look out my three living-room windows, curtains open to show off the view of the swirling snowflakes, and there is now a wall of harsh orange light, and shadows all around the edges. The orange light is from the streetlights outside, and my strange night vision is making giant halos around every beam of it, obliterating the ability to focus on anything distinct.

  I keep forgetting that before I sit down at my computer in the evenings, or with a laptop, I should turn lights on inside the house. The dark sneaks up on me in the winter and it’s not good for my eyes, just as it’s not good for anyone’s eyes, to stare into the backlit screen while everything else is dark.

  Though everybody else’s eyes can adjust to the newly dim room, whereas I will stumble and trip until I find my way to bed.

  Evan wants me to put my indoor lights on timers, so that I don’t have to remember, so that my environment accommodates me automatically and it’s safer.

  Evan really likes those words. Accommodate. Safe.

  Even his hugs are safe and accommodating.

  Apertr’s messenger dings.

  Did you see that it’s snowing?

  Sometimes, there are these little reminders that C’s in the same city.

  I look at the orange haze where the view used to be.

  When I came home there were a few snowflakes. Has it picked up?

  I’ve told him stories about hiking around Italy with my mom, about my attempts to learn to cook. I’ve told him my favorite color is blue and that I’ve read Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor dozens of times. I’ve told him funny stories about people I’ve watched on the bus.

  His answers have almost always been that he wants to know more.

  But I’ve never told him my name. He calls me Lincoln, and what he tells me are the same mixed bag of stories and confessions that lead to almost nothing except weird intimacy and daydreams.

  I’ve never had an imaginary friend, even though I’m an only child.

  It’s snowing pretty hard, now. You must already be in bed.

  Yes, let’s say that. Let’s also say—

  First snowy night of the year.

  Just so that he might say—

  If only I was there with you.

  I stare into the orange haze. Brush my fingertips over the keys, just brushing, unconsciously practicing how Evan tried to show me once how braille is read before I shoved the practice plates back at him and left early.

  If only you were.

  I ignore the blur of the room and focus on the neat square of our message window.

  Under the covers, completely naked, when the rest of the room is cold and it’s started to get quiet outside is the best kind of naked.

  Tonight, he’s right.

  We’d have to keep our bodies really tight together, I write. Our legs and arms all around each other. So the covers stay on.

  I’d want to touch you.

  Like I’m touching myself, now?

  I’m not, yet, but just clicking the SEND button makes me want to.

  I don’t know. How are you touching yourself?

  It’s not fair if I don’t really do it.

  Softly. With autocorrect on.

  It’s more the idea of it.

  The idea that this man, somewhere in the city, imagines touching me—like I’m touching myself, my fingers slow and just now slippery.

  More this idea than it is anything he might write to me.

  After all, this is awkward.

  But when I touch myself in the dark room, I don’t feel awkward.

  It makes me all achy, until I skid over my hard and swollen clit with my thumb and then it’s more than aching.

  The biggest surprise is how much you make me laugh.

  I can’t touch myself how I want to, thinking about you. I’ll take care of myself later, under the covers. Can I take care of you, now?

  I reach to tap the keyboard, I only need one letter.

  Y

  Sometimes, like I told you, I think about kissing. But that’s not what I’m thinking about tonight. Tonight I’m thinking about your legs against my shoulders and my hands pushing against your inner thighs and my tongue tasting you, until you reach down and grab one of my hands so that I touch you and taste you and let you ride my fingers nice and slow while my mouth works you.

  Oh. He’s never quite gone this far, and it’s far enough that I have to grip an edge of the laptop to keep from bucking it off while I buck into the heel of my hand, my middle finger deep.

  I don’t get off like this often, getting my fingers inside of myself is sort of special-occasion-style masturbation, but his words—his daring to go there—make me so wet and horny I need something to fuck against.

  I come sooner than I want to, I try to hold off, forcing my hips to slow and resist how everything is tightening up, but I peek at his sentences again, see a mix-up of letters that spell grab and pushing and tongue and the heel of my hand presses so good against my clit and it’s over. The best come I’ve had in forever. My back and hip muscles are shaking.

  When I drag my hand from my panties it makes me sort of jump and I almost go for it again.

  ?

  I take a breath and kind of cough. I have to pull a tissue out of my pocket to clean up so I can type and that’s kind of embarrassing and also kind of fantastic.

  I’m not sure what to say. Except, I came all over myself. I didn’t even know what to imagine, exactly, except your words.

  Lincoln, baby. God.

  Lincoln. Baby. God. This is such a strange hobby I’ve got here. I’m kind of—flailing. I want this, but I’m not asking for anything, it’s just something that’s happening to me.

  C asks, as much as I will let him.

  I don’t know how to answer him. I close my eyes and think about how worked up he might be. Hard. Maybe, waiting for me to respond, his hands free, he’s already squeezing and gripping and rubbing.

  Are you?

  His answer is instant.

  I will.

  I feel tired and, as my orgasm fades, kind of jangly and sad. Thinking of him turned on, how he’ll help himself to sleep, makes me impatient with these encounters between us but not brave enough to change the terms.

  Then, intrusive, like remembering something a little too revealing you’ve said at a party, I think of Evan. I think of how he stared across the courtyard while he figured out what to say to me, how he hugged me back so tightly I felt the sadness drawn from my body.

  This, thing, with C—I should be breathless, from coming, from the stakes between us getting a little higher. I should be worried about him and his arousal, worried like a lover is, as desperate
to play as he is to get off.

  I’m not worried about him. He’s words under glass. He’s close-up pictures of random parts of the world that can’t be fit together into anything whole.

  We’ve cut up little parts of our lives, mounted them on slides, and looked so closely at them, under so much magnification, they don’t make sense. Like his dog nose that doesn’t even look like a dog nose, for fuck’s sake.

  He didn’t even make me come. Not really. It was my hand over and inside me, it was me making sense of a handful of words he felt brave enough to give me, generous enough to give me.

  From a distance, it is just me in this room, fucking my hand in the dark.

  Good night, C.

  Then I shut my laptop. I don’t want to see how he responds. Without the light from the computer the room seems almost pitch-black.

  It’s not fair.

  The more I see, the more I can’t make sense of anything. I begin the long stumble to bed.

  It must be snowing, because everything’s quiet and still.

  Chapter Five

  Comfort and Joy

  I sit in the therapy room by myself until it is five minutes past the time we are supposed to start, and then I give up and decide to leave.

  I am surprised to find that Evan is in the foyer again, sitting on a cube-shaped leather sofa that is one of those sofas that isn’t really meant to be sat on, I think. It’s all low to the ground and his knees are higher than the level of his hips and the back of the thing is cutting across the middle of his back, but he has his hands behind his head and manages to look weirdly comfortable.

  The foyer’s completely silent, echoing how quiet the campus has been getting as we edge closer to the winter break and students take their finals and leave, fly in all directions to their homes, leave the grounds crew with fewer and fewer walks they need to shovel to clear the way for the skeleton crew of administrators and staff, researchers like me.

  Snow’s been drifting against the buildings instead of groups of students.

  A silver tinsel tree in the corner is blinking with blue and white lights.